Testing the Selection Hypothesis

Having validated the PRM scale and evidenced the relationship between show content, political identity strength, and evaluating a show as politically relevant, Study 4 examines politically motivated selective exposure of fictional entertainment television programming depicting social issues.

It is necessary to start with an overview of what selective exposure is from a conceptual and methodological standpoint. Selective exposure is defined as any bias in exposure to media content, such that the media one consumes diverges in composition from the available media content (Knobloch-Westerwick, 2015). Although this divergence could be toward any attribute of media content and based on any bias of the media consumer (e.g., sports fans who primarily choose to watch sports programming), here and in the political communication literature the term is used to indicate the selection of media congruent with political attitudes or identities. Thus, politically motivated selective exposure comprises two features: selection of some media content over other media content, under the condition that the selected content is politically congenial to one’s views.

Selection can take the form of discrete media choices (e.g., selecting to watch a given television show over another show at a particular point in time) or of media preferences, typically identified as the abstraction of choice tendencies in the aggregate

(Knobloch-Westerwick, 2015). In other words, an individual who frequently chooses some media content over others could be said to have a preference for the frequently chosen media content. The operative words here are “over others”—selection takes place in an environment in which the

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media consumer has various options for media consumption and can make a decision to consume some media content out of a pool of potential choices. I will return to this below in the

discussion of methodology and measuring selective exposure.

Closely related to selection, either in terms of choice or preference, is avoidance. The selection of some media content over others could be a result of a desire to consume the chosen media or a desire to avoid unchosen media (Knobloch-Westerwick, 2015). In other words, media selection may either be due to a genuine desire to consume particular media content, or it could be due to a desire to consume media that is not the other available options (rather than consume no media at all). The reverse of this is also true: not choosing some particular media content and choosing some other media content could be the result of avoidance of the unchosen content or merely of a stronger desire to consume the chosen content. In short, selective avoidance can only be inferred from selection behaviors; it cannot be measured directly through experimental

methods, which are the most common and most desirable ways of examining selective exposure (Knobloch-Westerwick, 2015). One would have to explicitly ask people whether they were avoiding exposure to particular media content, which would require a level of awareness over one’s media choices that is greater than what is assumed under the selective exposure paradigm (Knobloch-Westerwick, 2015).

This has implications for what conclusions can be drawn from any study of selective exposure/avoidance. Of note, this is not a question of whether selective approach or avoidance are two equally strong tendencies (e.g., Garrett & Stroud, 2014), but rather what insight can be drawn from observing individuals select some media content and not select other media content.

Whereas selection definitely indicates a desire for some content over others, it’s not necessarily the case that non-selection indicates avoidance of certain content; it could also simply mean less

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desire for the unchosen content. Methodologically, we can infer that avoidance (and its inverse, approach) has occurred based on attributes that differentiate chosen vs. unchosen content over the course of multiple selections. In the case of politically motivated selective exposure, selective exposure is often measured as the degree to which pro-attitudinal content is selected, and

selective avoidance is measured as the degree to which counter-attitudinal content is not selected (e.g., Garrett & Stroud, 2014), accounting for other attributes of the media selection choices.

This brings us to a methodological discussion of how to measure selective exposure. My descriptions above discuss selective exposure measurement in the context of the observation of choices between media content. Although other measures (e.g., self-reported introspection of past media use, rating of interest in or desire for individual media choices separately) have been employed, the observational approach employed in experimental designs is the preferred method (Knobloch-Westerwick, 2015). Ideally selective exposure is measured by giving survey or experiment participants the opportunity to choose between media stimuli and observing which choices they make. There is another methodological consideration: whether participants’ media choices are recorded unobtrusively or not. Unobtrusive observation is the preferred method since it mimics real-world selection behaviors best and is less prone to participant reactivity

(Knobloch-Westerwick, 2015). Of course, unobtrusive observation is difficult if there are no actual media for respondents to consume. Unlike in other studies such as those done using articles on mock news websites (e.g., Garrett & Stroud, 2014), my participants won’t be able to actually watch the mock television shows for which they see descriptions. As such, I cannot give them the opportunity to watch a show or shows and then observe which ones they choose to watch. Instead, I ask participants to rank shows in terms of which they’d most like to watch (Coppini et al., 2017). Thus, participants must still choose only one show to be ranked first,

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second, and so forth. I go into further detail of how I recorded program selection in the Method section below.

The purpose of Study 4 is to test the selection hypothesis: that evaluating media texts as politically relevant will be positively related to selective exposure. The end state is the

confirmation of the relationship between identification of the show as politically relevant and selective exposure to the show. The ability of the PRM scale to predict selective exposure would also serve as additional evidence supporting the concurrent validity of the scale. The

fundamental prediction of the selection hypothesis is that:

H1: Participants will engage in selective exposure to a greater degree when they evaluate shows as more politically relevant than when they evaluate shows as less politically relevant.

Additionally, because evaluation of the political relevance of media is a function of political identity strength, I predict that PRM will mediate the relationship between political identity strength and selective exposure, such that the way that viewers with stronger (as opposed to weaker) political identities come to engage in selective exposure is through the degree to which they evaluate media as politically relevant. In this mediation relationship, I would expect stronger political identities to lead to higher PRM scores, which should lead to greater selective exposure. Thus, I hypothesize that:

H2: PRM will mediate the relationship between political identity strength and selective exposure.

Study 4 Method